Don Macpherson: Discount for students from France doesn’t help Quebec

Don Macpherson, The Gazette03.06.2013

Don Macpherson

Several well-known nationalists are among the academics at French-language institutions who signed an open letter in Le Devoir last week calling for deep cuts in public funding for McGill (pictured), Concordia and Bishop’s.Allen McInnis
/ The Gazette

Now they want to starve it financially, along with the other English-language universities in Quebec.

Several well-known nationalists are among the academics at French-language institutions who signed an open letter in Le Devoir last week calling for deep cuts in public funding for McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s.

One of their arguments is linguistic, and it is similar to the one for restricting access to English colleges: English universities represent a threat to the French language because their graduates are more likely to go on to work in English.

The other is financial: The English universities receive more than their fair share of public funding.

While only 8.3 per cent of Quebec’s population has English as its mother tongue, 25 per cent of the province’s university students attend English institutions, which, the letter says, receive 29 per cent of “all revenues allocated to universities.”

So essentially, the letter suggests that funding of the English universities should be cut by more than 70 per cent. Adieu McGill, Concordia et Bishop’s.

What the letter doesn’t mention is that many French-speaking Quebecers attend the English universities, without losing their language or their identity; some, such as McGill graduates Véronique Hivon and Martine Ouellet, go on to become Parti Québécois cabinet ministers.

The disproportionate number of students attending English universities is partly due to the greater value anglophones have traditionally placed on education in general and higher learning in particular.

Until the creation of the public Université de Sherbrooke system in 1954, the province had more English universities (three) than French ones (Laval in Quebec City and its offshoot, the Université de Montréal).

The English-language universities are still more successful at recruiting the students on which their revenues from tuition fees and subsidies are based.

And successful and English? Quebec can’t have that.

The letter also complains that much of the funding of the English universities doesn’t benefit Quebec, since many of their graduates don’t stay in the province.

For example, it says that about half the doctors trained at McGill leave Quebec.

But maybe the letter’s signatories should also look from McGill across Mount Royal to the opposite slope, and the HEC Montréal university business school.

Last week, Radio-Canada television reported that a special fee discount for students from France costs Quebec’s financially hard-pressed universities $84 million a year in lost revenues.

The French pay the same fees as Quebec students, which is less than one-sixth of the cost to other foreign students — and only about a third of what other Canadians pay.

As a result, more than 10,000 French students are getting quality educations in Quebec at bargain rates, paying only about 15 per cent of the real cost.

At internationally ranked HEC, one-quarter of the current undergraduates are from France.

But while the fee discount is supposed to encourage French immigration to Quebec, HEC estimates that less than half of its students from France are still in this province five years later.

That’s smaller than the proportion of McGill medical graduates who stay here.

“Currently, the French cost us too much in relation to what they bring in for us,” economist Claude Montmarquette, author of a study on foreign students in Quebec, told Radio-Canada.

“The question we have to ask ourselves, given the state of public finances, is whether it’s advantageous for us to give up $84 million in revenues essentially to subsidize the French.

CORRECTION: Due to a reporting error, Don Macpherson’s Tuesday column said that Quebec’s third French-language university was the Université du Québec system, created in 1968. In fact, it was the Université de Sherbrooke, founded in 1954.

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